


Don’t Trust the B— in Ending B

by broadcastdelay



Category: Clue (1985)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 01:23:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1087940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/broadcastdelay/pseuds/broadcastdelay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Communism’s not a red herring, and Mrs. Peacock’s not quite as flighty as she might seem, but some things never change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don’t Trust the B— in Ending B

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wasserfiend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wasserfiend/gifts).



> Thanks ever so much to [Beatrice_Otter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Otter) for beta'ing.
> 
> Somewhat spoiler-y warning: In one or more endings, some characters may die.

After her arrest (“Completely unjustified,” she’d announced loudly, “The State Department will hear about this.”), Mrs. Peacock sat calmly in the holding cell of the local jail (where the FBI, for unknown reasons, had decided to stash her until the weather cleared), looked curiously at her cellmates (drunk, disorderly, asleep), and waited. She picked at the hem of her dress; she toyed with her frizzling hair; she coughed exaggeratedly to communicate how unfit for breathing the stagnant air was. She waited.

But finally, she heard the faint screeching call of a red-eyed vireo (three months late on its standard migratory route), and she slipped on the small gas mask she carried in her hairpiece, and waited some more.

One at a time, drunk and disorderly joined their compatriot in sleep, as did the guard outside the cell.

Mrs. Peacock was comforted that apparently _some_ people could be relied upon to do their jobs, and she told Vladimir as much as he drove her back to the mansion she’d earlier been so ignominiously escorted from.

She gingerly tossed a steak at the Doberman (who looked at it, unimpressed, having had similar offerings already, but chomped at the bait regardless), eased through the window in the conservatory she had left unlatched, pressed the notch in the woodwork, and crept through the passage to the lounge. Her gown swished against the too-close walls, and she determinedly didn’t think about spiders.

Her contact was waiting for her. All that was visible was one black-gloved hand,  dimly spotlit by an indeterminate light source.

“ _Well,”_ Mrs. Peacock huffed. _“_ That could have gone better—without my being arrested, thank you—if only you had—“

“Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?”

“All the time,” Mrs. Peacock replied. “It’s really quite—“

“Perhaps you should listen,” Wadsworth said, moving out of the shadows.

“ _You,”_ she said viciously.

“Me,” he agreed. “I can’t let you get away with this, you know. You’re a traitor to your country—it’s disgusting.”

“I have it on good authority I’m a jolly good fellow,” she said archly. “And who said anything about _letting_ me?” She pulled the pistol out of her purse, shot at him blindly, grabbed a silver briefcase from underneath the table, and swept out into the night in a flurry of gold lamé and minor panic.

A black car pulled up in the front drive. Mrs. Peacock got in, tripping only slightly on the running boards, saying, “Go.”

“I heard shots. You had to kill them, didn’t you?” Vladimir asked in amusement. “Why must you always kill them?”

Mrs. Peacock hummed noncommittally and patted the briefcase in her lap. “It gets results, comrade. It gets results.”

The duo sped away.

**_Unconfirmed sources say what happened next was this:_ **

Mrs. Peacock stood at an abandoned airfield, shivering with cold despite the comfort of her mink overcoat. She clutched at the briefcase in her gloved hand, and resisted the urge to pull out a timepiece. Either they’d be here for the pick-up, or they wouldn’t. And if they weren’t, she would just—make do. Call back Vladimir, perhaps, although he was currently, in his role as Paul Bunlan, en route to brunch with the sort of Washington elite she had once circulated with herself. She hoped the Soviets knew how to throw good parties. Her husband, when he had pitched the idea that they evade the blackmailer by simply defecting, as they’d been hoping to do for a while (and they’d sold enough secrets that they had room to bargain for expedited passage), had been decidedly vague on the point of the Soviet social scene.

The plane arrived, though, and they were off, and in Mexico by the time she woke. “You’ll catch your next plane at 10 tonight,” the pilot said, grabbing the second half of his payment.

“But—tonight? Why not _now?_ Where am I supposed to _go?_ I’ve been taking correspondence courses in _Russian,_ not Spanish!” 

Mrs. Peacock might have appeared, to the casual observer, to be on the brink of hyperventilation, but really, she was just trying not to scream.

The ensuing hours she spent languishing in the hangar, telling a bored traffic controller everything she knew in Spanish, in varying arrangements ( _Necesito ir al ba_ _ñ_ _o. Ba_ _ñ_ _o ir necesito al.),_ were ones she would never get back.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t just fly straight to Russia,” she grumbled. “If we’re breaking all these laws _anyway.”_

But then she heard a faint hum in the blackness.

“About time,” she rasped as she climbed aboard the aircraft.

The man helping her in just gave her a dour look. “Weather,” he grunted.

It was a complaint he would echo several more times as they began their rather turbulent journey across the Atlantic.

“Shoddy Soviet engineering,” cursed her escort.

“Hey, this top-of-the-line prototype,” the co-pilot shouted back. “Supersonic, super-secret, she good plane!”

“She seems to be intent on dumping us in the ocean, so I would have to disagree,” Mrs. Peacock said, holding a hand up to stabilize her wildly-tilting headpiece. “And I was under the impression that this particular model had been grounded before ever attempting powered flight.”

The impression had been given to her only by an obliquely worded telegraph received at the Western Union station, where the clerk had chewed gum loudly and looked at her like she was the one with the problem. It might have had something to do with the fact that none of her contacts—despite her demands—had seen fit to provide her with a change of clothing, and ball gowns were not the traditional daily wear in Coahuila.

“Eh, government forget we have this. So we take, we sub in other plane engine,” the co-pilot said, “No worries, flies good.”

“Except for now.”

“Except now!”

Mrs. Peacock couldn’t help but admire that kind of cheerfulness in the face of certain death, even as she faced her own fiery death in a crash of fuselage against forest (in which nature, as it does, won out).

“Guess the landing mechanism’s not quite fixed yet,” the co-pilot gasped out.

But no one was left to hear him as he died, save the trees they had felled in their descent onto a lonely barrier island.

Out of the darkness stepped a shadowy figure, who reached a gauze-wrapped arm into the still-smoking wreckage, and walked away with a slightly ash-covered metal briefcase.

“Mr. Hoover,” the figure said into a walkie-talkie, “Object acquired.”

“Excellent, Mr. Green,” came the response. “Go home to your wife. We’ll contact you when we need you again.”

Mr. Green obligingly went home to his husband, and in response to the accusation that he’d taken up smoking again, replied only, “Just been around others who were, dear. Go back to sleep.”

**_Official records report it happened like this:_ **

Mrs. Peacock stood, peering out into the darkness of an airfield that had once been the training ground for the region’s greatest barnstormers, but had now fallen into disrepair. It was about to see its greatest excitement in decades, she thought, awaiting her pick-up and shivering as much in anticipation as with the cold.

Finally she heard the plane she’d been waiting for, and finally (though not before kicking up a few frigid gusts), it opened up to reveal a dimly-lit cabin, and a tall, sallow man reaching a hand out to her.

She took it, for that was the polite thing to do (and also, because it had been a long night and her slippers were really terribly uncomfortable, and she wasn’t quite tall enough to climb up unassisted).

“Mrs. Peahen, we meet again,” said the extractor smoothly.

“Pea _cock,_ ” she said firmly.

He smiled toothily. “Yes, as you say.”

He continued to smile at her, somewhat disconcertingly, as they took off again, and even as the plane was buffeted alarmingly by the rather mild seasonal winds.

“A clean get-away,” said her companion, seemingly immune to the turbulence.

Mrs. Peacock smiled back weakly, clutching the briefcase in her arms as if it was a strand of pearls.

 _Clank._ Another force rocked the plane, this time not the wind. Mrs. Peacock jolted forward, startled, and saw her companion looking around as well. He said something in Russian over the comm system to those in the cockpit, and whatever he heard back in return made him shake his head and start swearing in an intriguing combination of Russian, French, and English.

“We have an unexpected guest,” he said to her, finally.

“A—“

“Not so fast,” Wadsworth said, sweeping up into the compartment and dusting off his suit. “In the name of the FBI, I am commandeering this flight. Redirect flight path to the Department of Justice building. You, sir and madam, are about to meet Mr. J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Heavens to Betsy!” Mrs. Peacock exclaimed. “You’re alive!

“So it would appear,” Wadsworth said, with a gracious sweep forward into a half-bow.

By the time the helicopter was landing on the roof of the DOJ building, and Mrs. Peacock being manhandled by a swarm of men at the behest of that unfortunate beatnik who’d tried to sell her on religion (the opiate of the masses! The very idea.), she had almost convinced herself that that didn’t mean Wadsworth was in fact a cybernetic robot. His face, she thought to herself as she made a show of kicking out at her captors, just didn’t seem _real._

“So long, Mrs. Peacock,” he said dryly. “May we not meet again so soon.”

But Mrs. Peacock knew she’d been the best of distractions (all for the cause), and what the FBI really wanted—what _she’d_ really wanted—was now well on its way to the USSR, having been transferred mid-flight to a smaller aircraft below.

“So long,” she spat out. “May your dinner taste of pickled red herring.”

Her villainous tagline voice, she thought regretfully, really needed some work.

**_But really, what happened was this:_ **

Mrs. Peacock waited in a freezing airfield, impatient but determined.

There was something to be said for the relative reliability commercial flight, as compared to a network of sleeper agents and bribed pilots-for-hire. But the plane came, eventually, and if it was somewhat smaller than she wished to temporarily entrust her life to—well, it was going somewhere, and she needed to go before the FBI came by to pick her up from the cell she’d just vacated. So she got on the plane, and she steeled herself to the nausea, and she only screamed twice, at least until they began the descent into Ciudad Acuña _,_ at which time it was more of a prolonged scream, and so only brought the total to three times.

“Lady,” the pilot said disgustedly as he let her out and headed over to file his (forged) flight plan, “I don’t care how much your scary mobster friends pay me, I’m never flyin’ you again.”

“ _Well,”_ Mrs. Peacock huffed. “As if I’d want you to.”

And when she found her contact, who said her next plane wouldn’t be until late that night, she was just piqued enough to say, “ _Fine,”_ and hitch a ride into town with a local who seemed more amused by her than anything else.

“Never trust long-distance promises,” she told him as they bounced along the rutted road. “Wait until you can look people in their lying eyes.”

“Claro,” he agreed amiably. “Lo que dice.”

Mrs. Peacock, gratified to be taken seriously, expounded upon her point. “For instance, if your husband—or, let’s say, your wife, in your case—says, ‘Go to the dinner party, it can’t hurt, you might find out something interesting, and it’ll be a good chance to finally get that briefcase away from the Cook,’ even though you both know one should never meet with blackmailers in person, especially when you’re planning on fleeing the country soon _anyway—“_

“Estamos aquí,” the boy said blandly.

Mrs. Peacock looked at him blankly, until she took the waving of his hand as an indication she should disembark. “Oh!” she said. “Thank you, I suppose.” And she looked around the town and thought even layovers at Idlewild were preferable to this.

But she gamely stepped into a shop, emerged soon after with an armful of gifts to present to her husband’s new colleagues (stamped leather wristbands for all, and a sarape for herself), and returned to the airfield a happier person, albeit one with a Mexican policeman on her trail.

He stopped her before she could enter, demanding papers and and an explanation. Mrs. Peacock, of course, demanded the same from him. He presented her with his badge, saying calmly, “The sarape does not quite help you blend in. And ball gowns, though decorative, are _not_ the traditional daily wear in Coahuila.”

Mrs. Peacock scrunched up her face. “You know, you remind me of someone.”

“Papers?”

Mrs. Peacock hit him on the head with her shopping bag (particularly weighted down with the wrought iron bookends she’d purchased for her husband), and sincerely hoped her plane would arrive before he regained consciousness.

Her life, she thought contentedly as she boarded the plane, was now one of intrigue. Not even the uneventful journey as she slept for hours en route could dispel her of that idea.

“Welcome to the USSR,” said a small man in military uniform who greeted her as she stepped off the plane in Moscow. “My dear.”

“Darling!” she said, “You have no idea how good it is to see you!” And Mrs. Peacock and her husband, the former U.S. Senator, former sleeper agent, and current party loyalist, walked off to their awaiting car. 

He looked down at the metal briefcase she clung tightly to. “I see you’ve managed to bring it, then.”

“Of course!” she replied, blissfully ignoring the fact that success had, at times, been a very near thing. “Including your little black book of Senators’ bribable offenses, all intact. Her secret recipe box, too, which it’d have been almost as much a shame to have lost. No one else has ever managed to get monkey’s brains cooked to that precisely perfect texture.” She smacked her lips reminiscently.

At their housewarming party (obligatory, Mrs. Peacock insisted), Mrs. Peacock took a sip of her vodka, and determinedly made no face, nor spit it out. “Comrades,” she said warmly, “how charming it is to have you to our home! We are, of course, so delighted to have had the opportunity to take refuge in your lovely country, and to contribute to your cause, and, most of all, to meet all of you—let’s talk, shall we? Get to know each other, about your families, your hobbies! Who wants to start off, hmm?”

The blank stares that met her, some glazed over, some shell-shocked, she attributed to the fact that her Russian remained rather hit-or-miss. The fact that she had often met with this reaction when speaking to fellow English speakers in her native tongue did nothing to dispel her illusions.

She smiled more broadly. She was an experienced hostess, well-prepared to deal with tough crowds. She raised her glass.

“Za zdorovje!”

And the strange spell over her listeners broke, as they all, in relief, raised their glasses as well.

“Za zdorovje!” came a rousing chorus, able to be heard even by those outside the manor.

And Mrs. Peacock smiled, fiddled with her stole, and drank.

Half the world away, Agent Green arrived at an abandoned airfield, sirens blaring and guns blazing, and, after startling a group of delinquent teenagers, was disappointed to conclude that his inside source had apparently confused his dates, or his coordinates, or an unfortunate combination of both.

“Until next time, Mrs. Peacock,” he promised to the whistling winds. “Until next time.”


End file.
